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god the ACLU response on this is such absolute fucking garbage
this just completely fails to acknowledge the chilling effect that this shit has on speech 
the internet as a platform for free speech and creativity is literally being stifled because using it to speak freely or produce creative works regularly results in people deciding to use all these poorly moderated platforms to harass and threaten you
every single free speech absolutist group had a huge flaming sign, in the form of gamergate, that explained why their position harms the most vulnerable and stifles expression in 2014. they have not changed their position. they have not learned nuance.
grindr, like so many tech companies, has failed to look at its own product and say "what is the worst case scenario for how people could abuse each other using our service"
and EVERY TECH COMPANY is going to keep doing this until they are required to moderate hate and abuse on their platforms
and guess what: there already are regulations forcing websites to moderate their content and they are doing it. they're doing it in ways that work fine and do a decent job of curbing hate by having to hide nazis in france and germany.
and they're doing it with broad, shitty solutions that crack down on queer people and sex workers because of bad regulations like FOTSFA/SETSA
this isn't a fucking untamed wilderness of free speech that is going to be ruined by interference. youtube is already demonetizing videos with queer content, tumblr is doing the entire fiasco it's been doing, sex workers are getting banned from paypal, etc etc
there's stuff in that article with people saying that companies are expected to do this shit for ethical reasons but that it'd be too much to try to get them to do it because of laws. why are we still indulging in this fiction that companies will have ethics on their own?
there is SO MUCH CONTENT we will NEVER SEE because people didn't feel up to the likely harassment that will result from sharing it
and because racists, misogynists, transphobes and other bigots are empowered to gather and radicalize and regularly given big platforms to share their harassment campaigns on, this means that effectively THE MORE AXES OF MARGINALIZATION YOU ARE ON, THE LESS FREE SPEECH YOU HAVE.
platforms NEED to be accountable for the mobs that gather on them and harassment ringleaders NEED to be accountable when make incidents of abuse exponentially bigger with their involvement
and one of the reasons that this is necessary is BECAUSE OF FREE SPEECH
because having the theoretical right to speech doesn't mean anything when you're being threatened if you use it
and this isn't just a tech issue. this is about platforming, too. when people stopped giving Milo a platform to spew hate from he vanished into obscurity and massive debt
who'd have thought that one of the biggest ways to get him to stop doing harm was to stop PAYING HIM MONEY TO COME TO YOUR CAMPUS AND DOX YOUR STUDENTS
but there are a zillion other people just like him aiming for that same grift. Tucker Carlson's job is to go on TV and rile up people's fears and regularly give them specific targets to harass.
i've only seen the tiniest corner of what happens when Tucker Carlson goes after Zinnia Jones or Sarah Jeong from them talking about it or looking at their mentions. it's nasty. it's hundreds, sometimes thousands of people
when that happens it isn't just an attack on that person: it's a threat to do the same thing to other people who draw that kind of ire.
and people will STILL play civility police about people having a protest at Tucker Carlson's house and believe his dramatized account of what happened.
people will STILL invoke the "it's a slippery slope to ban Nazis!" argument while not giving a shit about policies to ban sex workers
free speech absolutism is massively hypocritical and regularly fails the marginalized groups whose speech it is supposed to protect, because it gives more protection to the powerful than people whose speech is actually vital to creating a free and just society
the speech that people are going to bat to have protected is almost always boilerplate hatemongering and abuse. it says nothing new. it serves no function. there is no social good to seeing the thousandth person make a helicopter gender joke
whereas the speech of people from persecuted religious minorities, the speech of queer people talking to one another and telling queer kids they aren't broken, the speech of sex workers warning each other about abusive clients-- that's all threatened by mobs and/or regulation
imagine if any of those groups got a tenth of the support that flowed in from the "banning abusers is against free speech" crowd that jumps in every time a TERF or an alt-right figurehead gets a platform taken away. it'd be a different world.
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i'm currently going through withdrawals from a medication i need to get off of, so if you reply to this and i ask you to clarify or rephrase, it's that i am having a hard time parsing some things i read. cheers!
